


The Day of the Prescratch

by HaroThar



Category: Homestuck, The Day of the Triffids - John Wyndham
Genre: Alternate Universe - Apocalypse, Apocalypse, Character Death, F/M, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-13
Updated: 2016-11-13
Packaged: 2018-08-30 17:08:06
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,217
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8541649
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HaroThar/pseuds/HaroThar
Summary: I got a Tumblr prompt "kill me- Kurloz and Gamzee" and now I'm finally posting it here! It ended up being a Day of the Triffids AU, whoops. Kurloz POV





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [FudgingPastry](https://archiveofourown.org/users/FudgingPastry/gifts).



Of all the apocalypses, it had to be the one written by a sexist dickwad with a fetish for survival sex and ski suits. You put on a pair of skinny jeans, loose jeans over top of that, and then sweatpants. You’ve taken to wearing bras just to add the extra layer of protection, under your tank top, t shirt, sweater, and heavy leather jacket. Gloves, goggles, a face mask, a hat beneath your hood, and finally your heavy boots. Fairly certain you have no skin left showing, you line up with Damara (who you recognize for her posture), Kankri (who you only bring along on these missions because he’s so LOUD he makes good bait. Somehow he’s still alive and also hasn’t put any of the rest of you in jeopardy), Porrim (probably the reason why the chatterbox hasn’t died yet, you recognize her for her long hair spilling out the sides of her hood), and Horuss (who you recognize for the peculiar way he stands: perfectly still). Meenah is in front of you, arguing with Cronus, who is bitching about being put on gate duty. He is the only one who thinks it is unreasonable that he is on gate duty. Everyone else thinks he is insufferable to work with and sees the sense in putting the camps _best sniper_ in charge of _guarding the goddamned gate._

Your triffid guns slip easily into their spots on your three belts, and your handgun finds itself a home on your left thigh. You haven’t had a need to shoot at any humans since, you know, the triffids killed everyone save your small group.

The rotting corpses of the blind and dead pollute the streets like leaves in the fall. Your nose hardly even recognizes the stench anymore.

Triffids lurch about on their three viney legs, multitudinous as rats, although they too have all gone blind. At least rats are a fairly reliable source of unspoiled meat, since Latula is so good at cooking them. And also since she can’t smell what she cooks. 

The triffids are probably in a three way tie for the world’s most annoying creation, right up there with Kankri and Aranea. Cronus, of course, comes in at a close second. He’s still arguing with Meenah (who is in charge of your camp for a REASON) and you stare out the gate. Triffids are piled up there, waiting for you to open the metal bars so they can lurch in. Their bulbous, flower-like heads sway and the rods along their roots vibrate and hum nauseatingly at each other. When you get too close to the humming for too long, you sometimes envy Meulin her deafness. The thrumming rods distract you, and you cannot afford to be distracted when semi-sentient plants are just waiting for you to let your guard down so that they may strike you with their poisonous, barbed ‘tongues’ and consume your rotting flesh like they have consumed everyone else in this city. 

“Cronus Shithead Ampora I swear we are just doing a grocery run to the Sam’s Club on the edge of town now get yer ass in the guard station or so help me cod and tuna I will beat yo ass beshore we leave now GET!”

Finally, the fucker fucks off and Meenah gets to turn to all of you. She’s bedecked in the glory of a scavenger but still manages to look like a queen. You make a mental note to try _really hard_ to find more condoms this run, for your camp’s sake as much as your own. Can’t be worried about propagating the human race when survival is hard enough barely scraping by without the added burden of a child.

You hope humanity dies out after this generation. May the triffids inherit the earth, just after _you’re_ done with it.

Meenah used to waste her time with motivational speeches, with rehashing the plan. Now, it’s all so second nature to you that she doesn’t need to bother. You all climb into the semi truck and crowd into the frankensteined backseat. It sort of looks like something out of an old Mad Max movie. You, being Meenah’s favorite (and you say that with no small amount of pride) get shotgun. Where the cup holder used to be, there is an actual shotgun that you pick up and hold at the ready, prepared to roll your window down and shoot, should ever the need arise.

Meenah tells you all that if Sam’s Club doesn’t fill up the back, she’s going to another tire place and looting some more of those. You can tell why. Tires aren’t exactly something she’s easy on, since her method of driving tends to be “plow over as many fuckin’ triffids as humanly possible when getting from point A to point B.”

Your arrival at Sam’s club is fairly quiet. Your group only needs to kill about twenty triffids before you can climb out, and you hold the rest of the plant swarm at bay as your crew dismounts and together you dispatch the rest of the triffids in the immediate area. Their tongues lash at you all from the close proximity, but you’ve got enough layers on that you don’t even flinch at the attacks. They’re just little licks of pressure, nothing to become alarmed at.

Damara and Kankri are sent on empty duty, for two entirely separate reasons. Damara empties out the various Walmarts and Costcos you loot because she’s a DAMN good hunter, and nothing gets the jump on her. She is motherfucking hellfire and if you weren’t so in love with Meenah you’re pretty sure you’d be in love with her. Kankri is on empty duty because his truly motherfucking _ceaseless_ prattling draws all the plants in the building to him, and Porrim typically wanders in after a few minutes to help him dispatch the crowd he’s collected.

When Porrim goes in, the rest of you follow. You used to have someone guard the door, but your clothes are thick and the triffids are no longer even a fraction of as frightening as they used to be.

“MEENAH!” Damara screams from the back of the Sam’s club, and the two of you shoot each other a look as you both break into a jog. What could Damara, of all people, need backup on?

You see a stranger and nearly shoot him with your triffid gun. Damara has her pistol pointed at the… man? boy? Person. He is, somehow, very much alive, and also sighted. Which is weird.

“Alright, alright, stranger, put yer triffid gun down. That can wound us but we can kill you and boy howdy you are outnumbered as fuck.”

The stranger turns and looks at Meenah and he isn’t even wearing goggles. Or sunglasses, or _anything_ to protect his face and eyes from the triffids’ poisonous stings. 

“If you’re so motherfucking confident, maybe y’all should be the ones to lower your weapons first,” he says, and his voice is surprisingly quiet. He looks wild, you were expecting something loud and half crazed.

Meenah just laughs at him and waves at Damara, who lowers her pistol with a grumble. “Cheeky brat. You a traveler? Hard to think you’d be from around here without us catching wind of you.”

“Yeah, sister, travel with a right circus I do.” The stranger lowers his gun as well, and you can see the minute way he shakes and almost _predict_ when his shoulders or eyes or hands are going to twitch. “Seventeen others, plus myself. We go place to place lookin’ for supplies.”

“Well scram. This city’s taken and we ain’t up for giving handouts.”

“Sister, you might not want to be so flippant when you talk to my boss.”

“Who’s that, your daddy? You gonna run along and cry at your daddy about the mean lady who doesn’t wanna pass out charity like she’s some grandma with a tray of cookies? Get lost, kid, and put a goddamned hat on or somefin, you’re gonna get hit by them plant fuckers and die on my doorstep and we don’t need nofin else attracting their goddamn attention to our place.”

The stranger, to his credit, scoops up the bag of canned vegetables he must’ve dropped when he ran into Damara and hightails it out of the building. Horuss unpeels himself from the shadows nearby and tells you that most of the building’s been checked. The cans are really all that’s left, though a few boxes have not been gnawed through by rats and other vermin. Horuss is mostly in charge of hauling, and it looks to you that Meenah will have space to get more tires after all. 

Back at the gate, you all have a surprise waiting for you. Cronus is shouting with his rifle pointed at what looks to be a crowd of seventeen men, all but one (a _very_ large man) are wearing some sort of hat. The large man is bald as the moon and you wonder how he hasn’t gotten it stung by the planty poltergeists you are plagued with. His screaming is very unpleasant.

“Whale, whale, whale, water have we here?” Meenah calls out through the window of the truck. “Visitors?”

A man in a very large, pointy red had seems to have diplomacy on his mind, and walks toward the truck with a sinister looking man in a bright green suit and a fedora close behind him.

“Whale get lost. We ain’t St. Paul’s Charity House for Strangers. You ain’t stickin’ around, you ain’t comin’ inside. Move it, fuckers, this city’s taken.”

“My,” says the sinister man while the one in the red pointy hat sighs audibly. You seriously wonder how none of these fuckers are dead, given how much skin they all have exposed. “What a rude girl.”

“Fuck off. Go die in a ditch with the rest of humanity.”

“How unfortunate, I was rather hoping we might skip this part and just rob you all in your sleep,” the sinister man says as the large man reaches into one of the vehicles.

“I wasn’t,” the bald one says as he pulls out a massive machine gun.

One shotgun shell later, you almost find it a pity you never got to see him use it.

After that, Cronus seems to finally catch on and do his goddamn JOB, and he starts firing at the fuckers one after another. You all get out of the truck and hide behind it, listening to the glass windows shatter. Kankri ends up with a bullet in his shoulder because he didn’t actually move fast enough. None of you are surprised. Only Porrim is worried. 

The bullets fly for a little while, but Cronus is considered your best sniper for a reason. One bullet, one life. His record is, for literally the first time ever in the time you’ve known him, broken by the man in the yellow hard hat. He actually moves fast enough that Cronus’ bullet doesn’t land, which is weird as shit. Meenah gets him, though, and you wolf whistle at her.

“Nothing turns you on like a bit of death and bloodshed, eh, ‘Loz?” she calls back, and you can hear her grin even if you can’t see it. By the end of it, Kankri has taken the worst of the damage (save the stranger’s corpses) by having gotten a bullet in his shoulder and a fire extinguisher in his face. You can see why these men had survived with their skin uncovered, they were good shots, but your group is better so in the end it was for naught. A lot of big talk for a group that didn’t manage to kill a single member of your own.

A startled scream alerts you to an 18th person’s presence. The boy from the Sam’s Club has finally made it, and Meenah laughs at him.

“So this is yer crew? The ones I was supposed to be polite to?”

“Thank you,” he breathes, and you’re all thrown for a bit of a loop.

“Say what now?” Damara asks.

“I- They- they kept me as bait, siblings, I was- I couldn’t say no to them, it was do what they told me or die! But they made me kill so many people so they could raid what supplies _they’d_ gathered and hop from town to town and I could never say no and if they’re dead, then, then I don’t have to anymore and-”

“Yeah okay I’m gonna cut you off right there,” Meenah interrupts. “I ain’t buying your ‘thank you you saved me’ carp, you just want us to take you in and let you live with us by pretending you never wanted to be in their group in the first place. Textbook.”

“What, no I didn’t, that’s not, I’m not lying sister please I’m not-”

“Kurloz,” Meenah says, and you nod. You drop the shotgun- why waste ammo for that when you have plenty of ammo for your handgun and this fucker is close range?- and approach him steadily. His wild eyes widen and he struggles to pull out his triffid gun as you pull up your handgun and you shoot him straight through his pleas.

“I’m gonna fuck you so hard tonight,” Meenah says appreciatively.


End file.
